We Need to Talk About Kevin - movie review

At the risk of sounding like Fabio ("I can't believe I Can't Believe It's Not Butter's not butter!"), we need to talk about We Need To Talk About Kevin.

There's something deeply unnerving about Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's bestseller. And lest that seem like an understatement of massive proportions, what's unsettling about this Kevin is not that the boy himself is a bit of a bad egg, or that he does some terrible things, or that his mother did or didn't want to have him in the first place, or any of the usual things that are brought up about the book and now the film.

Specifically: is We Need To Talk About Kevin meant to be a nightmare vision of a woman drowning in misogyny?

I hope so, and I ask because that possibility doesn't seem to have coloured any of the discussion of the film, yet throughout it I found myself gripping the armrest with white knuckles as its protagonist was put through the wringer over and over again.

"We need to talk about Kevin" has become a sort of code, the phrase indicating discussion of the thing nobody wants to consider (or, given the book's success, maybe they do): what happens when your kid turns out to be a psychopath.

Such is the lot of Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), whose son Kevin (played by Rocky Duer as a toddler, Jasper Newell as an 8-year-old, and finally Ezra Miller as a teen) has grown from contrary bub to sinister child to the gaunt young man she visits regularly at a local penitentiary, locked up after he carried out an atrocity at his high school, the details of which gradually become clearer.

The film is constructed in a scattershot way that isn't expressly non-linear, since Eva's 'present day' narrative moves ever forward with grim determination (she goes to work, and in her downtime, cleans the red paint that someone has thrown at her house), but that creates a mood of sickly unease, perhaps to capture some of the nature of the book's unreliable narrator. 

The superficial reading is to ooh and ahh about whether or not Kevin was born bad, but the boy - (over)played with an almost pantomime-level of malevolence by the hammy Miller - was not the focal point, for me. Instead, I felt like screaming: "For Christ's sake get this woman some help for postnatal depression!"

Failed by her milquetoast husband Franklin (John C. Reilly), who refuses to believe her numerous cries for help, Eva is left adrift in a sea of emotional detachment; she papers her study with rare maps ostensibly because she's a travel writer, but it's a downbeat metaphor, since she clearly can't find her way out of the mess she's ended up in. Did she want to have the baby in the first place? I can't imagine she'd be the sort of woman to carry out a pregnancy out of misplaced sentimentality; she loves Franklin, and wants the kid. It's what comes after that is the tragedy.

To wit: the sort of unending punishment that makes Lear's misfortune look like a cakewalk; she loses her professional and creative identity, amongst other things that society tells us are women's most important achievements. She's abused verbally and physically by local residents (a coworker hisses "Who else is going to want you, bitch" when she demurs his offer of a dance at the office Christmas party). And why? I guess because she's a woman, and she gave birth to him, so it must be her fault.

In this way, you could say We Need To Talk About Kevin is a particularly feminist horror film, painting in vivid brushstrokes the true terror of sexism and the deep-rooted misogyny that sees the womb as some sort of incubator for all manner of terrible things.

Never having been that impressed with Shriver's tale, which is a smugly gee-whiz fable of parental ambivalence ("Make sure you really want that baby, or it'll turn into a murderer!"), I'm inclined to think that it's due to the joint talents of Ramsay and Swinton that any of this other thread is apparent. The story itself is a potboiler; from underneath it Ramsay and Swinton excavate the real horror, which is not Kevin or his behaviour, but Eva's reality.

Writing in the Guardian after the film's Cannes airing, Peter Bradshaw said the film was "a brilliantly nihilist, feminist parable: what happens when smart progressive career women give birth to boys: the smirking, back-talking, weapon-loving competitive little beasts that they have feared and despised since their own schooldays?"

Well, gee, I hate to break it to you, Peter, but feminists don't actually "fear and despise" boys, or men.

Nor does Eva Khatchadourian. But I fear and despise everything that happens to her, and the fact that nobody seems to notice it (or, worse, that they think it's deserved) - and that's what we really need to talk about.

- three stars